With this entry in my 100 Essential Films series, I’m now a tenth of the way through the list. (If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.) At this rate, I should be finishing the project up sometime around 2039… As Jack Nicholson once said, “So much to do, and so little time.”
Film number ten is a movie about the Great Depression made while it was still very much happening. Although FDR’s New Deal policies had started to turn things around in America, the country had not yet entered World War II in 1940, and the economic precarity of a huge swath of the American people (as I note in the review, the more things change, the more they stay the same) was the main concern of the country.
The novel The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books of all time. I was introduced to it by one of the best teachers I had in high school, Terry Taylor, who taught American History. I’m happy to say that the movie mostly does the book justice. For this screening, I rented Wrath through Amazon Prime. The transfer looks great; Gregg Toland’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography is stunning. He shot the movie a year before his seminal work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.